Ramsay, David, and Joe Paradiso. "Peripheral Light Cues as a Naturalistic Measure of Focus." ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences. 2022.

Abstract

Deeply immersive experiences are intrinsically rewarding; evoking them for another is a cornerstone of success in artistic or design practice. At the same time, modern interfaces have created a state of ’partial continuous attention’, and frequent self-interruption is more common than ever. In this paper, we propose a smart-glasses based interaction to quantify self-interruption dynamics in naturalistic settings, in which a slowly changing peripheral LED is monitored as a secondary task by the user. We demonstrate that this interaction captures useful information about a user’s state of engagement in real-world conditions. These data can provide designers and artists novel, objective insight into the depth of immersive experience evoked in real-world settings.